OPM: Turn It Up to 11

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting Inc., an Ontario, Canada-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at andy.jordan@roffensian.com. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

I have written way too many articles for gantthead without a reference to Spinal Tap, so I thought I would put it right this time by looking at how we turn OPM up to 11. Organizations are expected to deliver more and more with less and less, and that has in part led to the growth of organizational project management. However, in my experience organizations have not been able to define what a successful OPM model looks like--things may have improved from before, but where does that score on a scale of one to 10? Are we turned up to the max? Are we getting as much as we can out of these amplifiers? Sorry, I mean this process? If we are at 10 already, then let’s go in search of 11 because that’s one better, right?

(For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about, go rent This Is Spinal Tap. I’m sure it’s available on VHS…they still have that, don’t they?)

The basicsLet’s start with the basics of organizational project management. It’s designed to bring together the disciplines of portfolio management, program management and project management. These disciplines are clearly related, but in many organizations they are not treated as a connected sequence of processes; rather, they are treated as different specialties with their own unique owners, accountabilities, etc.

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